I've noticed recently that my phone needs to be charged way more often than I used to have to do it. I used to be able to go for nearly 2 days on an 80% charge, but I started having to charge daily . Sometimes even multiple times per day! My first thought was that my 2.5 year old Pixel 9A might be starting to show signs of age, and the battery was on its way out. But I have always had charging optimised, so it only charges to 80%. Looking at the health of my battery in settings, it shows the ...

The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Zurich. The mood was electric: They were this close to a career-defining breakthrough. The group — consisting of then-postdocs Sahar Diskin and Philip Easo, graduate student Ritvik Ramanan Radhakrishnan, Benny Sudakov, and Vincent Tassion — was perfecting a solution to one of the biggest open problems in… Source The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Z...

The seventeenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 17, Mike interviews James , the author of "with words, wonder" (formerly James' Coffee Blog) about, among other things, identity and personal websites, writing on the web, communicating the potential of personal websites, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. James Mike The seventeenth episode of Wonders of ...

There’s a widespread belief that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is inevitable. In this post, I argue that this is false, and believing it is upstream of a lot of bad discourse. Why do people believe it? It’s easy to believe. Samuel Butler , already in 1863, observed that machines are improving faster than humans are improving. Today, AI systems are gaining capabilities much faster than humans: in five years we went from systems that can barely string together a sentence to auto...

Cancelation Terminology Aug 31, 2026 A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms , but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other. synchronous cancelation is an (often implicit) control flow structure. It unwinds the stack and looks like this: task. cancel (); // The task will...

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. 1 Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS, 2 rather than the Shuttle's main computers, IBM-built AP-101 systems. For storage, the Spacelab computer contained 128 kilobytes of RAM. Rather than silicon memory, the computer used magnetic core memory, with each bit stored in a tiny ferrite ring. In this...

I lost count of how many times I looked—and photographed—Mount Krn over the past decade. It’s impossible to miss, standing right there in the background of almost all my walks around the valleys, with its 2245 meters and its characteristic gently sloping side. And yet, I never hiked it. The reason why I never hiked it was that it’s a long hike and past me wasn’t a fan of long hikes. But past me is, well, in the past. Current me, on the other hand, loves long hikes. And to be fair, ...

0.0 Context setting Thursday, 27 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon. I started this on Tuesday and then now suddenly it’s Thursday? That’s no fun. Separately, I’ve also started noticing a bit of burnout or a bit of pressure? I enjoy writing, but I also don’t want this to become some sort of horrific pressure. Which is why I’m trying very hard for it to not be a big deal that I had a gap of a couple days. Also! This is episode 26 of season 21 , which is a lot of episodes. The prev...

Blargz com is a general blog. It runs short write-ups, task tutorials and plain bulletins on subjects that share no link at all. Nothing arrives through a single dated timeline. Each page drops into its own topic bucket, and those buckets never join up. What follows covers the publishing model, the category split, and who the format actually serves. What Happened To Blargz Com And How It Publishes Now The site never adopted a specialism. It stayed wide, and the format settled into somet...

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly diffe...

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868 , for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively. My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel. In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC ...

What's up on the small web? August 2026 roundup 2026-08-30 12:15 Summer rolls on, and the small web had a busy month: a major Lagrange release, a new graphical client for Android and desktop, terminal tools crossing v2.0, and some good community debates. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in August 2026. Geminispace past 5,000 known capsules On August 24, Lupa (Stéphane Bortzmeyer's Gemini crawler) published a fresh snapshot:...

This arrived out of the blue in today’s mail: As I wrote when I received the original award , I am very honored, but wish I’d had more impact on how software engineering is taught and how software engineering researchers interact with practitioners. Having just finished packing my daughter’s belongings into a truck so that she can move back to university, I’m going to spend the evening thinking about roads not taken… This arrived out of the blue in today’s mail: ...

Morning in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities New home sales are down 6.3% year over year. [ C...

This post continues to elaborate on Virtual Consensus and the new Loglet abstractions of the AtomicLog and LogDrive . My last post focused on composability, this post looks at log sealing. A common aspect of segmented logs is that when extending the log with a new segment, the current active segment needs to be sealed to prevent further appends. This post discusses segment sealing in the AtomicLog and LogDrive abstractions. I’m going to treat Virtual Consensus here less as a fixed API and m...

By Emma Yanyang Kong , Aditya Deshpande , Asad Abbasi , Bowei Yan , David Fagnan , Ashish Rastogi , Dhaval Patel , Ray Zhang Introduction The Netflix experience is a journey of discovery. Every visual cue, from the artwork on a title to the video previews that autoplay while you browse, is there to connect you with a story you will love. We call these visual cues assets , and choosing the right one for each member is a personalization problem of its own. But which image or video previe...

Like most Millennials, I’ve gone through three phases of music file organisation: A single, giant, amorphous folder of files played through something like Winamp. The files are named whatever, and all the metadata is incomplete, invalid, or incorrect… but it all held together just well enough to tell your Lou Bega remix from your Pérez Prado original. An iTunes music folder with an enforced structure the software organised and maintained for you. Giving up and paying a str...

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let's call it Work Cloud . If you install the ChatGPT desktop app - the app that used to be cal...

Our Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft when it flew past on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Where did our Moon come from? The origin of Earth’s cosmic companion is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its surface, our understanding of its origins has come a long way. Yet it’s far from complete. Over the decades, scientists have proposed multiple hypotheses to attempt explaining how the Moon came to...

BILL: Lance, I have a question and a meta question: a) List all the presidents and vice presidents who were colorblind. b) Do you know this sort of thing since you are colorblind, and hence might have looked this up in the past? LANCE: (b) No. And if Marco Rubio runs for president in 2028 he will need to earn my vote. He won't get it just for being colorblind. As for (a) I asked Claude. Only one case is reasonably well documented, and it isn't a vice president. Bill Clinton is red-green colorbli...

JSON is a standard format for data interchange. It is effectively a tiny subset of JavaScript made of objects and arrays. It looks as follows {"key":1, "text":[1.0,2.0]} . Many programming languages include a JSON library in their standard libraries: C#, Go, Java (soon), Python, JavaScript, etc. The Go implementation is convenient, but not especially fast. Go 1.27 makes a new JSON package ( encoding/json/v2 ) available by default in its standard library. The two APIs look almost the same: ...

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement” : not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position. I’ve always found it vaguely silly when engineers put “built a product that made $X” on their resumes, when they just did the JIRA tickets that came across their desk. Today, value over replacement is even more important. A replacement-level engineer in the 2...

I’ve been helping SF companies get sales and one of my customers came to me with a cold message that he wasn’t getting any good results with it. A competitor tool generated it. Can you find out what’s wrong here? If you said “everything”, you’re right. There’s so much wrong with this message and I feel bad that he’d been using it for months. as part of the 1:1 onboarding on my GTM product, I’ve been helping my customers fix their sequence and messages so they get the m...